How an Olympic Gold Medalist Learned to Perform Under Pressure

Alex Gregory is an Olympic rower, World Champion, and father of two. In 2012, he won gold in the coxless four at the London Olympics with teammates Tom James, Andrew Triggs Hodge, and Pete Reed. But success didn’t come easy — earlier in his career, he battled nerves and asthma, even blacking out in the water (twice). HBR talked to him about how he learned to thrive under pressure. This is an edited conversation.

You’ve been really open about how early in your career, you weren’t the best at performing under pressure. What would happen?

Although I liked the training, I never really loved the racing. Even at a young age I’d get nervous. In the early days, we were in a crew with two or three other people, and being in a boat with other people helped to calm my nerves. But to really pursue rowing, I had to learn to do it on my own in single scull. And that’s when I came into my difficult years, where things would go wrong. Basically it all boiled down to worrying too much about the result. It’s wanting something so much and worrying about it so much that you make it not happen. It became a vicious cycle: I’d fail, put even more pressure on myself, panic that I was going to fail, and fail again at the next event.

So how did you start to get your nerves under control?

About eight or nine years after I started rowing, I’d decided I was going to give up. I’d been very lucky to be invited as a spare man for the team going to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, but I’d decided I wasn’t cut out for it and this would be my last event.

But then I got to Beijing. The Olympics is totally different. It’s everything. It’s what anyone aspires to be at. And sitting there on the sidelines, I just felt like there was something missing. I hadn’t achieved what I wanted to achieve.

And I realized that my answer had always been to practice technique. I had very good technique already — that was what had gotten me to where I was. But it was my physical strength that wasn’t good enough.

It was like a light switch went on. It was so simple, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.

I decided to give rowing one last chance. I spent three months just doing weights before I started training again with the guys. I could immediately see results — I was suddenly beating people who had always beaten me. It gave me so much confidence, and that confidence was all I needed.

It’s interesting to me that the lynchpin was focusing on improving a weakness. At HBR, we often tell people to focus on their strengths.

It’s so easy and much more fun to work on your strengths. You get immediate positive feedback — you looked great out there, that’s perfect, well done! But the thing you’re practicing, well, you were already good at it. You end up improving on that stuff naturally. So I think what you really need to work on is what you’re not good at. And I think that’s as true in business as it is in sport.

Rowing is unlike any other sport I can think of in the degree to which it balances the tension between competing as individuals and competing as a team. You compete against each other to win a seat in the boat, but then have to really come together as one for the race. How do you do that?

One of the most difficult things is racing against my mates. Andy [Triggs-Hodge] and Pete [Reed] are my friends, but we’re also competitors. I train every day, seven days a week, 350 days a year with the same 25 guys. Same lake, same day, same time. And for nine months of the year, we are competing against each other to make the seats. As soon as we’re brought into a crew by the coaches, we’re not competitors, but teammates.

Rowing is all about moving together. Not just a visual thing or an audible thing — it’s about feeling it. If someone is even slightly out of sync that will affect the boat speed. Molding it together comes from the coach watching from the outside, but also from all of us on the boat giving each other feedback.

For example, in 2011 we got in the boat and immediately it worked. We just clicked from the first stroke. It was magical — and we ended up winning the world championship. But when a new crew was selected for the Olympics, we took our first strokes together and it was almost the exact opposite. We were all moving in the right way pretty much, but the magic just wasn’t there. There was nothing the coach could see from the outside, and that kind of gets a little bit worrying when you’re supposed to be the top four guys in the country and you’re expected — and expecting — to win gold.

How did you figure out how to bring the team together then? Because you did end up winning the gold.

We really struggled for the first couple of months. We weren’t slow, but we knew that there was something missing. Australia had beaten us in the last [important race] before the Olympics. We knew we had to change something major, but we just couldn’t do it. And you can’t push back the Olympics if you’re not ready. You have to perform on that day. If you don’t, you fail.

But we’re fortunate in Great Britain to have a great resource in previous rowing champions who are available to talk with. Two of us, Tom [James] and I, went to talk with Matthew Pinsent. He gave us a lot of advice, but basically it boiled down to being totally honest in the boat.

When we got to our next training camp, we all chatted for two hours about what we wanted, what we were trying to achieve. We got down to how we wanted the stroke to look, the technical aspects of it. I could say very openly to Pete, “OK Pete, you need to do this part better.” And he could say to me, “Yes, and you’re not so good at this bit, Alex.” Earlier, I might have taken that personally and not really wanted to do it, because he’d told me to do it [laughs], you know what I mean?

Now the feeling in our boat was different. Earlier, we hadn’t been talking about the right things. We had to really take criticism and give criticism in a constructive way. Then for the next seven weeks, we knew exactly what we would be working on, on every stroke for hundreds of thousands of strokes.

So you come back from training camp for the Olympics, and this time, you’re not a “spare man.” You’re on the team. The games are in your home country. And the British team is competing for its fourth consecutive gold medal in this event. To me that sounds like an enormous amount of pressure. How did you deal with it?

The Olympics is unlike any other event — the crowd, the expectations, everything is bigger. There’s a buzz. I can’t remember the exact statistic, but the number of people who get a gold [medal] at their first Olympics is much smaller compared with people who have been to one before.

So for me, being in this particular crew was great, because the other three guys had won in Beijing. They’d already done it, so I had confidence in them. I can take the pressure off myself when I share that pressure with someone else.

We had also had quite a few discussions about what the pressures would be — of what it would be like to fly back to London having been in the private bubble of working in our own little boats. We were prepared because we’d talked about it beforehand.

Thinking back to earlier in your career, what do you wish you had known about performing under pressure?

That I have to have people around me, first of all. Back when I was racing solo, I’d be in the water on my own, at training camps on my own, in a room on my own. My coach was the only person I’d talk to for six or seven weeks at a time. It was incredibly isolating.

And second, that it always helps to talk about the problems. In those days, I would physically shake on the starting line at the start of a race because I was so scared I’d lose. It was a terrible time for me. But if I had spoken to my coach and been honest with him, then I’m sure he could have helped. It sounds a bit silly, but I was too scared of him thinking I was weak or that I couldn’t do it, that he would think I wasn’t good enough.

I think that people in all walks of life probably feel that — that they should do it all on their own. Now I think that doing it on your own doesn’t mean you can’t talk to people, get their advice, and be honest about the problems. You’re still the one going out there and doing it.